Super Smash Brothers Brawl

[Relambrien]

Originally Posted by Squeek

All these videos you post? I can't tell if these people are good.

How can I tell if someone is good at a game if videos only show them performing one aspect of a game really well?

Are savants super-intelligent people? Smarter than everyone else?

If all you do is mano-a-mano fighting on one stage with one character, how can I even begin to judge your skill? I think to judge your skill, I'd need to see if you can handle random character and random stage selections multiple times. With and without items. Against humans and computers.

How else can I judge your skill? Honestly?

This falls into my caution earlier about differing definitions of "skill." Be careful, what you consider "skill" isn't necessarily considered "skill" by another person.

To elaborate, here's what I mean. By "skill" you are referring to overall proficiency of every aspect of the game, whereas others may consider some parts of the game irrelevant to player skill, or believe that people who are equally good at different aspects are equally skilled.

It is my personal belief that someone who is good at mono-a-mono fighting with no items (basically, a decent tournament-goer) inherently is good at mono-a-mono fighting with items, and also FFA or teams. Perhaps not -as- good (yet reasonably close), but since most aspects apply regardless of gametype, practicing one improves your proficiency in another.

EDIT: As an example of what my earlier post meant, listen to this. I just went to the Brawl forum on Smashboards, and the amount of flaming and arguing from both sides of the wavedashing topic is astounding. Like I said, the relationship between casual and tournament Smash players is probably the worst I've ever seen, in any game, ever. Oh, and the reason there's such an uproar is because, due to the Momentum Air Dodge, wavedashing in its Melee form has been eliminated from Brawl. Basically, you can't direct your air dodge anymore; your momentum carries you while you dodge.

But there has been a new technique discovered, the "Ink Drop." If you dash longer than your initial dash and tap backward, your character sort of falls over (in the initial direction of travel). However, this fall can be canceled by grabbing or attacking, meaning it's essentially a Dash Pivot--you can do anything you want out of a dash this way, without having to dash cancel by tapping down. Whether or not this will be changed by Brawl's release is yet to be seen, though.